Post-Bookbub Numbers, March (Patreon)

Over on the community, Erika asked how my post-February-promotion numbers were doing, so I thought 'hey, I bet she's not the only one who wonders.'

A short aside here: it still feels weird talking about numbers. This is the one thing you don't do in SF/F. If you have good numbers, you are boasting. If you have bad numbers, you are revealing weakness. It's a little like existing in the Chatcaavan court. There's no relaxing: you're either setting yourself up for a dominance fight or marking yourself as too weak a contender to have one. Such a pain. This is not so much a thing among romance writers, who have always been willing to swap numbers with me without flinching. A weird cultural difference? Dunno! Anyway. I am neither boasting, nor bemoaning, I promise!

Here, then, is a spreadsheet I set up to track the drop-off from the promotion (which happened February... 8th? Something like that). The numbers above represent only e-books, but it does collate the data from all retailers: Amazon, B&N, Apple, Kobo, etc. My physical books haven't really budged from their monthly averages, leading me to believe that print books (for my books, anyway) are mostly purchased by super-fans who are supporting the author, or because they only have shelfspace for authors they really love. Audio is going far more strongly than print: I'm watching that trend, and might add it to a separate spreadsheet to see what's going on there (Numbers for Jan/Feb/March are 37 - 724 - 146 respectively). 

As you can see, March numbers are still better than January, pre-promotion. By a long shot. Bleedthrough into other Pelted series continues; you can't see the Alysha books, but interestingly they're moving about as many units as Princes' Game, leading me to wonder if I shouldn't finish bulking up that series. (There are two other novels planned for it, and one novella.)

Also what you can't see is that there's almost no spillover into my other series. The new folks reading the Pelted books aren't moving into my fantasy work, or my other SF work (like Spots). My least popular Pelted series (Alysha), moving 346 units this year so far, is outselling all the other non-Pelted books combined by 107 units. This was a little disappointing to me until someone said that diversification of audience was as important as diversification of income stream for author success: basically, that you survive as an author better if you have multiple series that appeal to distinct audiences. I don't know if this holds up, but I like it, so I'm going to think seriously about how to capitalize on that advice. My most popular non-Pelted series is Morgan's Blood Ladders trilogy, which was a definitive "open and shut" series that I don't want to revisit. The next most popular after that, though, is the romance series (!), which beats out both Kherishdar and the Jokka by about half again as many sales. Since I was already planning another 3-5 installments in that series, that seems promising to me.

Plus, I've got Coracle developing, and that's definitely a different audience.

In short, then: the sales numbers have fallen a lot, but not as much as I expected.

An interesting observation, finally, on the performance of various retailers. My (gratifying!) sales spike at Amazon was extreme, far more so than it was at other retailers. But as the days go on, the fall-off at Amazon has been much faster than it has at other retailers. My sales are stickier elsewhere: totals continue to average about the same they did weeks ago at Draft2Digital, which is collecting all the stats for non-Amazon sales, while my Amazon sales are tumbling downward precipitously.

I expected the tumble, because Amazon is a volatile and highly competitive market. Every day there's a Bookbub pushing some new science fiction novel, and it's only one of the many deals being promoted by advertisers (including Amazon itself). But the discovery that visibility and success in these other markets is lasting longer is a welcome surprise, and a fascinating one. I can see now how the people who do well in those markets say they wouldn't go exclusive with Amazon for anything. It might be that once you start doing well over at Apple or B&N or Kobo, you can keep that status more easily.

Food for thought. More importantly, fodder for business planning!

Anyway, I continue to track numbers. I'll keep you apprised as long as you're curious! And thank you, by the way, for your reviews and recs. I can watch them ripple outward!